Media players are today present in various kinds of electronic equipment. Examples of such equipment include a portable media player apparatus for digital audio files like MP3 (e.g. portable MP3 player) or AAC (e.g. Apple® IPod®); a mobile communication terminal (e.g. a mobile phone) with an included media player application, a palmtop or personal computer with an included media player application, a compact disk player, a digital versatile disk player, a minidisk player, a game console, a digital camera, a home stereo and a car stereo. Nowadays, many of the apparatuses mentioned above often both have a large storage capacity and are capable of accessing one or more remote sources of media files over a communications network such as the Internet. In effect, this means that for a typical media player user, there is likely to be a considerable number of media files available for playback. In practice, it is necessary to provide some sort of control for the media player user over such vast numbers of available media files.
One way of providing such control is the provision of user-configurable playlists. A playlist may be described as a restriction from a universal (total) set of available media files for the media player down to a typically smaller set of currently selectable media files. By “currently selectable” means that the choice of a certain playlist by the user will cause the media player to restrict its forthcoming selections of media files to be performed (for instance in normal sequential order or in random order) to the media files that are on the playlist.
By defining different playlists, the user may sort the available media files into different categories which often correspond to different attributes of the media files, like Album, Artist or Genre if the media files are audio files containing music. Thus, the user may define a playlist which contains heavy metal songs, and another which contains music from a particular artist or from a particular album. Alternatively, the user may of course define playlists where the media files on the list have something else in common, perhaps simply representing a certain collection of favorite songs for the particular user.
Another way of assisting the user to control a vast number of available media files is the provision of a random or shuffle mode of playback. As is well known, in random (shuffle) mode the media files are automatically selected and performed one by one by the media player in random order, thereby relieving the user of the manual actions otherwise required for specifying each media file which is to be performed next. Random mode operation can be based on a specified playlist, on a specified attribute value (such as a particular album or artist), or on the universal set of media files that are available to the media player.
While the use of playlists and random mode operation in prior art media players certainly has its benefits, there are still some shortcomings, as will now be briefly explained.
Playlists have a limited length, either in the form of an explicit maximum length permitted by the media player (e.g. 20 songs), or for practical reasons because longer playlists become increasingly difficult for the user to manage. This is particularly so for a media player apparatus having a small physical size and therefore limited user interface and processing power (as is the case with for instance a portable MP3 player, Apple® IPod® or mobile phone).
Therefore, for a media player with a very large number of media files available (ranging from perhaps a couple of hundreds to several thousands), the user will have to create a large number of different playlists if he wants to group his media files into different categories. However, with a large number of playlists, it will be difficult for the user to remember the particular playlist or playlists which contain(s) the desired music at any given moment of time.
In addition, the prior art does not provide any support for assisting the user in adapting the playback behavior of his media player in response to sudden preferential changes, mood changes or environmental changes (for instance, the sudden appearance of another person, or switching from calm work or study to physical exercise or partying).